Muhammad and His Dao 169
the categories by which Chinese understood them, these missionar-
ies would more readily have been able to render themselves intelli-
gible in their new cultural context. But what initially was a positive
prism for interpretation later, it seems, served to render Chinese
Christians always somewhat removed from Chinese society.
Islam appeared in China for an array of different reasons and
was never based in the same way on notions of difference and ali-
enness. More important, in terms of having a significant communal
presence in China, it had a longer history. Muslims could look
back centuries and see Chinese families and lineages as their heri-
tage. The striking lack of and even hostility toward proselytizing
in the Chinese Muslim context also serves to elide apparent con-
flict or competition between Islam and dominant Chinese thought
(at least in Muslim eyes). An emphasis on conversion is implicitly
based on notions of the superiority of one tradition or belief sys-
tem over another. Christianity, as a result of its basis in missionary
and other proselytizing activity, was in a sense put on the defensive
in the Chinese cultural context in a way that Islam was not.
The dynamics of reconciling, on one hand, Christianity and
Chineseness and, on the other, Islam and Chineseness were thus
comparable but worked in opposite directions. Christianity, from
the very start and largely as a result of its missionary origins, pre-
sented China with the challenge of understanding Christianity, a
task accomplished through the application of Chinese categories to
a foreign entity.^10 Would-be converts first made sense of Christian-
ity through Chinese categories and then converted. The process by
its very nature was a binary or, at the very least, dialogic one, be-
tween two separate entities, one “Chinese” and one “foreign.”
In contrast, Chinese Islam had never configured the relationship
between China and Islam as oppositional. Chinese Muslims were
natives of China and saw themselves as part of its landscape. As we
shall see, they considered their history part of Chinese history.
When the Chinese and European missionaries themselves made use
of Chinese categories to understand Christianity, they were en-
—————
10. Grafton and Goodman, “Ricci, the Chinese, and the Toolkits of Textual-
ists,” pp. 95 – 148.